Narrative Paintings: A Time that was Unfair

Fifth and sixth grade students in art elective classes used their color-mixing and observational drawing skills to tell a story about a time when something was unfair. 

Students could represent something unfair that happened in their own lives or something that they feel is unfair in our society or the world. Before painting, they created mind-maps defining fairness. 

What does it mean for something to be fair?

Artists looked at Jacob Lawrence's painting "Bus" and discussed how an artist can use their work to tell a story visually through shape, color, and composition.

Students also looked at an etching of the Boston Massacre by Paul Revere. Since students study the American Revolution in fourth and sixth grade, they connected what they already knew about the etching from their history classes. Students also considered artists' motivations for telling stories. 

How can artists use their work to change people's opinions?

Pattern & Texture Paintings

Students in fifth and sixth grade explored making different kinds of brushstrokes to represent the variety of textures that surround us. Following their explorations, students created pattern paintings by planning their compositions, and filling their pages with patterns. They used white paint on a dark construction paper background to represent a scene or to create a design.

How might you create a smooth or rough texture with your brush?

Next, students added color to the negative spaces, by adding colors alongside the white lines. They looked at images of patterns in nature, as well as prints by the Finnish textile and fashion company, Marimekko.

Before creating their pattern paintings, students explored different ways of showing texture through lines and brushstrokes. They looked at objects from nature with rough and smooth textures. 

Students noticed the repeated lines and shapes in patterns, and they experimented with painting techniques by using the brush in different ways. Students discovered that they could the flat side, the skinny side or the tip of the brush to achieve different effects. 

Monochromatic Color Explorations

Students in fifth and sixth grade considered how one might use different shades of the same color to make something appear closer or farther away.

                                 

How might your use different shades of the same color to 

make something appear closer or farther away?

                                 

Students looked at different photographs and paintings of landscapes. They learned that atmospheric perspective describes the effect of objects being lighter as they get further away from you, and darker when they are closer.

They also noticed that details are clearer in the foreground than in the background. We discussed how landscapes can be organized into a foreground in the front, a middle ground, and a background. Students also looked different kinds of landscapes including imaginary ones. Next they sketched a landscape of their choice before painting it.

                                    

                       

                                 

Before creating their atmospheric paintings, students were challenged to mix as many different shades of the same color as they could. They learned to mix white, grey and black to their original color to make tints, shades and tones. Students also discovered that adding different amounts of the same colors can change your mixture.